31 January 2012

Open source lies at the heart of Google – it runs a modified form of
Linux on its vast server farms, and uses many other free software
programs in its operations. This makes giving back to the open source
community not just the right thing to do but enlightened self-interest:
the stronger free software becomes, the more Google can build upon it
(cynics would say feed off it).

One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the sense of entitlement
the owners of various kinds of monopolies display, and their common
belief that being able to maximize the profit from those monopolies
trumps any other consideration.

Well, this one's bizarre. Back in March 2010 we wrote
about the UK Usenet aggregator Newzbin being found liable for the
copyright infringment of its users. A year later, the ISP BT was
ordered to block access to Newzbin2, its successor. What amounted to the UK's first Internet censorship order was upheld soon afterwards.

25 January 2012

We've written
about the hugely-successful Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho many times
before, because he is a great example of an artist embracing piracy as a
boon not a bane. So it's great to see him offering his thoughts on SOPA:

After years of unforgivable inaction, the education world is finally
addressing the continuing disgrace that is computer teaching in this
country. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove's comments on this area, and now we have the Royal Society's report on computing in schools.

For a long time, the copyright industries have taken the position
that they won't launch new digital music services until piracy is
"solved" – or at least punished. The inevitable consequence of that
position is obvious to everyone outside the copyright industries –
people turn to other, unauthorized sources to satisfy their musical
needs. Fortunately, a few startups have launched pioneering digital
music offerings and some, like Spotify, look like they might succeed.

So the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of copyright maximalist legislation, SOPA and PIPA, have
been halted in their passage through the US legislative process. Of
course, they're not dead, but are sure to return, zombie-like, either as
modified versions of the current texts or new ones that turn out to be
exactly the same as the old ones at their heart. However, the
unprecedented action by the Net world to get the message across that
these bills were not fit for purpose does mean that our attention can
swivel back to somewhere else where bad things are happening: ACTA.

One of the useful side-effects of the groundswell of protest against
SOPA and PIPA is that a surprising number of people in positions of
power have come out against their approach, notably in Europe. First,
we had Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission
responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, who tweeted:

One new approach to teasing apart the complex relationships between
genes and common diseases such as cancer, heart disease, asthma and
diabetes is by creating huge biobanks of medical data and samples. The
idea is that by tracking the health and habits of very large populations
across many years, and then examining their DNA, it will be possible to
spot factors in common. Here's a major biobank that is shortly opening up its holdings for research:

Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it
down, you wouldn't expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by
SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject,
it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by
claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The
Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.

20 January 2012

There is a rather odd atmosphere within the parts of the online
community that fought so hard against SOPA this week – relief that all
that work seems to have had an effect, mixed with a certain disbelief
that for once the outside world sat up and took notice of the tech
world's concerns. Amidst all the justified back-patting, there is a
temptation to celebrate the fact that both SOPA and PIPA are "delayed", and to move on.

Since SOPA and PIPA are US bills, the focus has naturally been on the
US response to them – notably in the list of major sites that
participated in the blackout, or who have otherwise protested against
the proposed legislation. But it's important to remember that the whole
rationale of these new laws is tackling copyright infringement outside the US.

The role of technology in the wave of protests that swept the world last
year is a matter of debate. While some claim that social networks and
mobile phones allowed protesters to organize themselves with an
unprecedented speed and efficiency, others have seen their role as
marginal – or even counterproductive, since these same technologies also
allow governments to monitor events with greater ease than in
pre-Internet days.

Among the many high-profile organizations that are joining the SOPA
blackout today is Greenpeace. That's great, except that you can't read
an important post on the Greenpeace UK web site about why it is opposing
SOPA and PIPA (it should be available at 5 pm PST from the home page or here.

17 January 2012

One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore's Law is that
technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and
hence more attractive to governments eager to spy on their own populace.
The latest to heed the siren call of mass surveillance is Argentina.

So the long-awaited verdict
on the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer has finally arrived, and, as
feared, it's ridiculous. There are many others better qualified than I
am to comment on the detailed legal issues of the lop-sided extradition
treaty that lies at the heart of the case, so I would like to
concentrate on two aspects that I feel better able to comment on. Both
touch on what I think are fatal errors in the judgment; either is enough
undermine its arguments.

Against a background where some European courts are telling ISPs that they must block access to certain sites (in Finland and the UK, for example), this news from Germany comes as a refreshing change (original German article in Der Spiegel):

You don't have to be a marketing genius or industry pundit to foresee
that tablets will be an extremely hot sector in 2012. The launch of
Apple's iPad in 2010 largely defined the category, just as the launch of
the iPhone defined a new kind of smartphone in 2007; in 2012 we will
probably begin to see Android tablets start to gain major market share
just as Android smartphones have done this year.

11 January 2012

If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that
British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching.
As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially
consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and
making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the
message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:

10 January 2012

There's a wonderful line in Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical
Man-Month", where he says that when writing a program, plan to throw one
way - you will anyway. But that's a bit of a problem for conventional
software development, because it's not clear when the best time is to
throw that one away.

A recent Techdirt post reminded
us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won't be seeing
anything new in the public domain for many years. But even in those
"fortunate" countries that get to use cultural works a mere 70 years
after the creator's death, the situation is still pretty absurd.

09 January 2012

Just before Christmas I wrote a fairly strongly-worded condemnation of what I saw as the imminent betrayal
of open standards by the UK Cabinet Office. This was based on reading
between the lines of a new Procurement Policy Note, plus my thirty
years' experience of dealing with Microsoft. At the time, I didn't have
any specific proof that Microsoft was behind this shameful U-turn, but Mark Ballard has, it seems:

07 January 2012

One of the many dangerous aspects of SOPA/PIPA is that its backers seem
to have given no thought to what the unintended consequences might be.
In particular, there is no awareness that it might wreak serious damage
in areas that are very distant from the core concerns of unauthorized
copies of music or films – such as scientific publishing.

06 January 2012

A fascinating trend in recent years has been the gradual move from a
presumption of secrecy to one of openness, transparency and sharing.
This began with free software/open source, and has progressively spread
to include areas such as open content, open access, open data, open
science and open government.
Here's the latest field where people are advocating a more open approach:

05 January 2012

Against the background of today's war on sharing, exemplified by SOPA
and PIPA, traditional libraries underline an inconvenient truth:
allowing people to share things – principally books in the case of
libraries – does not lead to the collapse of the industry trying to sell
those same things. But publishers really don't seem to have learned
that lesson, judging by this article in the New York Times about the nonsensical attitude they have to libraries lending out ebooks:

One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is:
What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it
aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the
appropriate level of detail?

Perhaps there's something about the German legal system that encourages
judges to push their interpretation of the law to the limit, without any
concern for whether the results of that logic are absurd. At least
that is the impression you might get from two recent cases whose
judgments both make use of the internet by ordinary citizens increasing
fraught with legal risks.

04 January 2012

At the end of last year I reported
on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its
support for truly open standards. At least it's relatively
straightforward to keep tabs on what's happening in Blighty; Europe is
another matter - I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital
shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the
following page, entitled "Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC".

Already it's clear that one of the hot tech topics of 2012 will be "The
Internet of Things" – the idea that even the most mundane objects will
be hooked up to the Net and communicating over it. So far, pundits have
concentrated on trivial applications like being able to check your
fridge's contents from a browser, but potentially it could be much more
than that if the "things" are groups of sensors whose data can be
usefully aggregated.

03 January 2012

In my last column,
I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order
to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the
battle for online freedom in more general ways. That's something it has
already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the
awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.